August 26, 2007, 2:59 pm : Reading Festival Rules!

Well, my first festival in the UK was a blast and something that I have wanted to do since I was, well, younger than I am now. I have read about Reading (and had no clue either where is was or how it was pronounced). By the time I had my feet under the desk last week, it was far too late to get tickets. With a little scrounging around, I managed to get guest passes from EMI UK (cheers guys!!) and made it out to the Festival just in time for the sun to come crawling through the clouds after the last week(s) of grey, grey London days. Snagged our wristbands, giant beers in paper milk shake cups, a scheduled pulled from the wall of the PR tent and headed into the slightly muddy field! Go team!

Cold War Kids were first up, looked and sounded very very good and the crowd was into it. The show was good fun, except for the rather disturbing stoners standing in front of us, who brought an inflatable sex doll with them and spent most of CWK’s set punching and kicking the doll - scary to say the least. We moseyed over to see Maps, caught as little of Fall Out Boy as possible. I was wondering how they became so popular, when I looked down and this sad, odd message was scrawled on a pizza box. Maybe if you’re a guy and you text this phone number, you get a free pair of really small girls jeans and black guyliner….hopefully this isn’t some stalker trying to lure hapless young emo’s to a scary ‘Silence of the Lambs’-style pit in the basement….
We cruised back to the guest area, which was more like a holding pen for lots of people that didn’t want to get their shoes dirty. I did dig not having to line up for flat, keg beer, which made it the coolest high school party with credit cards ever! We gawked at Kelly Osbourne and a couple of Fall Out Boys and Hold Steady guys before heading back out to catch a little of LostProphets, who spent more time telling people to wave their hands and shout than they spent playing.
We scurried over to see Against Me!!! who were good fun and nice and thrashy. Then we had to get our act together - there were many over-priced nachos and warm beers to get into before running the gauntlet of the evening shows - we had 5 bands to see in 4 hours - requiring precision timetabling, beer balancing and drug-casualty-passed-out-on-the grass avoiding - deep breath…..

We lined up really early in the pit to get close to Nine Inch Nails, who ripped the place up - sounded and looked great and set the bar pretty high for the closers, Smashing Pumpkins. We had to hotfoot it across the grounds to make it to LCD Soundsystem, who luckily came on late so we caught ‘Us v. Them’, which is always good fun - this is the 5th LCD show I’ve seen this summer, all good fun but unfortunately all lacking ‘Losing My Edge’. Oh well, can’t have everything. After catching most of LCD’s set, we headed back up front to catch the headliners - on the main stage, Smashing Pumpkins and on the side stage, The Hold Steady.

Smashing Pumpkins started out dull and got more dull, hitting a little early stride by kicking into ‘Today’ and getting the crowd bouncing. It didn’t connect with us in the least, so we grabbed the last warm beers and a tub of fries to nibble while staking out a really good, close place for The Hold Steady. I saw them at Lollapalooza 3 weeks back and haven’t stopped listening to ‘Boys and Girls in America’, which it appears I was the last Minneapolitan to hear about. They are such good fun to listen to and watch live - a great ending to a long, hot, noisy, rocking day.

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